


Resonance

by Neyasochi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blade of Marmora Keith (Voltron), M/M, Monster Shiro (Voltron), Space Horror lite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26582710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyasochi/pseuds/Neyasochi
Summary: Years after Shiro vanished, Keith finds him again in the emptiest reaches of space and strives to save him at any cost— even if time in Haggar’s captivity has transformed Shiro into something monstrous.Keith deactivates his mask, letting its protective cover ripple away. The air that hits his skin is thin and chilled, the ship’s dying engines barely able to maintain a livable temperature. And then, trembling, he leans in so close to the screen that his freezing breath mists its glassy surface.He recognizes the symbols that spell out Champion and his heart seizes, drops, feels like it misses three beats. Images blink across the console screen for mere milliseconds: stills from the Imperial arena; a bare body on a slab; close shots of grey eyes opened wide. In them, Keith catches glimpses of a man he’d begun to think lost forever.“Shiro,” he whispers just before his throat constricts like a withering vine, dry and brittle.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 167
Collections: Across Realities





	Resonance

Keith’s first steps onto the listing Imperial cruiser are barely steps at all.

The artificial gravity is minimal. What meager power the _Kaltor’s Will_ still possesses is instead spent on generating breathable air, maintaining temperature, and keeping the ship baseline functional. When his boots do finally settle on the grated metal flooring of some unsecured outer corridor, the contact is ghostly light. Then Keith is bounding into the air again, gliding soundlessly as he descends deeper into the bowels of the dying ship.

And it _is_ dying. Keith had found the cruiser drifting aimless and lethargic, its many ports and mounted cannons lacking the sickly purple glow of the Empire’s quintessence-fueled engines. Within its reinforced hull, the ship feels eerily... empty.

The corridors flicker with weakly-fed light, at times plunging into full darkness that leaves Keith clinging to the walls until his Marmora mask kicks in and compensates for his too-human eyes. There’s no rhythmic march of sentries, no barking of orders, no warning alarms, no frantic footfalls of engineers trying to set the ship right. There are no bodies, either, which concerns Keith more than walking into a cut-and-dried bloodbath. 

Traveling deeper, he finds walls bent inward and sealed doors jammed open. The halls themselves grow littered with debris and the rended pieces of Imperial sentries, their crushed chassis and exposed wiring spinning slowly through the air.

Behind his mask, Keith’s brow furrows. He wishes he could radio back to base and tell Kolivan everything—wishes for another voice just to break up the yawning silence around him—but the _Kaltor’s Will_ resides in the middle of a vast and treacherous deadzone. No transmissions in or out. No comms. Only himself and the muffled sound of his breaths within his helmet as he hunts for answers.

And where better for the Empire to conduct their most heinous, secretive experiments than a stretch of space so harrowing and rife with cosmic feedback that all communication is effectively blacked out? It weighs heavy on Keith’s mind as he navigates the twists and turns of the Imperial cruiser, almost fearful of what he might find in the belly of the beast. If there’s anything left to find.

As he rounds a corner that leads to the command bridge, Keith recoils, shudders, and wrenches himself to a stop, face-to-face with a horror he’s only ever seen at a distance before.

The druid’s mask hovers an inch from his own, the darkness of its eye slits setting a slithering fear loose in Keith’s belly. He’s already drawn his dagger and cut frantic slices into the air before he blinks and notices there’s no body attached. No looming spectre of death. No flowing robes, no spindly hands capable of summoning unholy magic, no rattling whispers about turning him into one of _them._

Just a mask. It’s chipped at one edge and sporting a few hairline fractures, harmlessly adrift with the rest of the refuse floating around the empty husk of a ship. Gingerly, Keith touches two fingers to its surface and sends the druid mask spiraling away from him, watching until it thunks softly against a far wall.

No sign of the druid it belongs to, though. And still no sign of any of the ship’s officers or crew, either.

The bridge lies in ruin before him. Every console is shredded, every screen shattered. What blood splatters over the walls and stains the floors has long since dried and taken on that rotten, iron-tang smell that lingers after battles are settled. In dismay, Keith sifts through shattered circuitry in search of anything left that will allow him and the Blades to piece together the ship’s objectives and the disaster that struck. In the middle of his fruitless hunt for a handheld tablet or a working display, he hears a distant sound like metal grating on metal. 

It reverberates up the empty hallways, piercing the unnatural silence that’s taken up residence in the _Kaltor’s Will._ Keith’s skin goosepimples underneath his Marmora colors; the fine, fuzzy hairs along his nape raise to a near-painful standstill. But it’s a big ship, bound to groan after so long without routine maintenance. 

Or so Keith justifies as he turns back to the mission at hand. Still... the chill in his bones lingers long after the echoing fades. 

As he leaves the bridge and makes for some deeper corridor where the druids’ work might’ve been done, that same awful, haunting sound comes again. Closer, this time. And as Keith stills to listen, he decides it sounds less like the grinding of metal and more like the cry of something _living._

He hugs the deepest shadows and propels himself along faster, hurrying toward his best guess at where the _Kaltor’s Will_ would house its laboratories or production line. There are gouges in the walls here, metal shavings peeling corkscrewed along their edges. Curious, Keith briefly lines his fingers up with one set of four deep, jagged rake marks and finds they look like they came from a hand, albeit one vastly larger than his own, and wickedly-clawed besides.

Behind the impassive shielding of his Marmora mask, his mouth settles into a firm line. As he stumbles out into a complex of utterly devastated lab rooms, Keith has a clearer picture of what befell the crew of the _Kaltor’s Will_ —an experiment gone terribly wrong, a boundary pushed too far, a momentary slip that had unleashed hell on everyone within.

Another bellow sounds, its many echoes making its distance difficult to gauge. Keith slips into the nearest lab room, desperate to find some scrap of information to take home to Kolivan, and shrugs off the crawling sensation under his skin.

Wreckage floats through every inch of the lab. Shards of broken glass glint as they catch the weak residual light emanating from broken stasis pods and incubation chambers. But beyond all that, the blinking of one lone, functioning workstation sets Keith’s heart soaring. 

He speeds to it as quickly as he can, given the artificial gravity is maybe half of what he’s used to. As soon as he pulls himself to the console, Keith fishes out a tiny memory chip and clicks it into place. The chip does the heavy lifting for him, hacking through dozens of encryptions in the span of seconds and initializing a transfer of a _massive_ quantity of data.

Most of it either lies outside his realm of knowledge or flits across the screen too quickly for him to track. Pictures, reports, and videos blink open as they’re copied over to the memory chip, there and gone in a flash. Keith catches a few bits of jagged Galra script here and there, though. _Druid_ appears more than once. So do phrases like _biomass absorption_ and _living weapon_ and _Operation Kuro._

And then, so quick that Keith sees it more as an after-impression than an image itself, there’s a face he recognizes—or fears he does, anyway.

Keith deactivates his mask, letting its protective cover ripple away. The air that hits his skin is thin and chilled, the ship’s dying engines barely able to maintain a livable temperature. And then, trembling, he leans in so close to the screen that his freezing breath mists its glassy surface.

He recognizes the symbols that spell out _Champion_ and his heart seizes, drops, feels like it misses three beats. Images blink across the console screen for mere milliseconds: stills from the Imperial arena; a bare body on a slab; close shots of grey eyes opened wide. In them, Keith catches glimpses of a man he’d begun to think lost forever.

“Shiro,” he whispers just before his throat constricts like a withering vine, dry and brittle. His vision turns hazy red at its edges. With a whimper, he grabs hold of the console station, knees close to buckling.

The last time Keith had seen Shiro in person had been the launch day of the Kerberos mission, a few minutes stolen together outside of the barracks to say one last goodbye. He still remembers how the stars had hung in the predawn sky, how much he’d wanted to let out a few tears when Shiro held him close, how sweetly and surely Shiro had promised to be back in eighteen months’ time.

And after _pilot error_ and the Garrison’s quick dismissal, all Keith had left to cling to was the desperate, impossible hope that Shiro had somehow survived. That flame had been stoked all the brighter when his mother returned to Earth for him a few months later, trading stories of empires among the stars for his quiet recollections of the childhood years he’d spent with his father. This time, when Krolia left, Keith went with her—Earth held nothing for him anymore, but Shiro might still be out there somewhere in the universe, waiting.

And he was. In Zarkon’s arena. As a prisoner-turned-gladiator brutalized for entertainment in matches transmitted all around the Empire. Keith had begged his mother and Kolivan to save Shiro, then threatened to stage a solo rescue mission if they balked. But by the time Kolivan was able to insert Ulaz as a medical tech in the arena, it was too late. 

At the height of his gladiatorial fame, Shiro vanished.

And he’d been brought here, it seems, whisked from the Empire’s public eye to meet an even darker end.

While the data downloads, Keith tears into the ruins of the laboratory in search of Shiro. He claws through fallen ceiling tiles and shoulders through collapsed walls. With the pommel of his dagger, he shatters the opaque glass of the few remaining cryopods, heart sinking lower as each one turns up empty. Grim fear needles at Keith, lancing through his hope wherever it bubbles up.

_If Shiro was here when whatever monster the Galra made broke loose, then he might already be—_

That chilling, bestial cry he’d heard before comes again, close and drawing closer. High-pitched peals of rending metal accompany the thunderous gait of something fiendishly large barrelling down the nearest hall, and too late Keith realizes that, in his haste to search for Shiro, he’d been carelessly noisy.

A massive, hook-clawed hand breaches the doorway first, slamming into the floor so hard that the whole room lurches. A head follows, long and lined with jagged teeth; golden eyes stud its void-black skull like dozens of citrine gems. The creature can barely shoulder through the doorway, the long, white spines that protrude from its back scraping over metal as they catch on the frame.

Keith’s first thought as those myriad golden eyes fall on him is, _It killed Shiro._

His glance slides over to the lab’s only functioning console and the download in progress, and a second thought wells up in the tiny spaces of his mind that aren’t preoccupied with flash-boiling rage. _I can’t let it destroy that, too._

Keith bolts. There’s one other door at the far end of the lab and he escapes through it without a backward glance. A sudden flurry of snarls and shrieking metal somewhere behind him assure that the beast’s given chase. The leather-wrapped grip of his dagger warms as it awakens, blade extending to the length of a sword in a shimmer of transforming luxite.

At the dead end of a sealed airlock, Keith turns and makes his stand. The monstrous, one-armed creature fills the hallway ahead, cutting off any route of escape. Keith ducks aside to avoid the oncoming swipe of one clawed hand and very nearly succeeds. The tip of one pearly white claw catches him just along the jaw and rakes upward, carving a stinging slice up his cheek.

Keith returns the wound in kind, slashing angrily into the beast’s body. His blade drags through that dense, oily black muscle, cutting a path that simply seals back together in his sword’s wake. After a few more futilely shallow cuts, Keith finally lands a blow that strikes true. His luxite blade cleaves through almost a foot of amorphous flesh and reveals something underneath—something pale and scarred, a seam of red blood showing just before the black slides back into place and reassumes its muscled form.

Keith flourishes his sword as he changes hands, determined to thrust the tip of the blade into the beast’s chest and drive it as deep as he can. Whatever hides within is vulnerable, at least, and if it can bleed, then it can die.

But his steely resolve goes brittle as the creature’s head bows forward and Keith notices for the first time an off-color slash that rests under those roiling, quintessence-gold eyes, strangely familiar in its shape and placement. That glimpse of red blood—a rare color to see this far from Earth—comes back to mind. 

Keith’s breath dies on his lips. He reels himself to a rigid standstill, eyes wide as he thinks of the laboratory, of Shiro’s involvement, of Haggar’s cruel and strange whims when it comes to making new monstrosities for the arena and the battlefield.

The creature has no such qualms. It lifts Keith off of his feet and pins him to the wall, the metal at his back groaning as the claws wound around his body pierce through the space-grade alloy and sink in deep. He’s held fast as a set of jagged jaws opens and reveals row upon row of teeth; a yawning darkness looms behind them, less a throat and more a void that can swallow him whole.

“Shiro?” Keith calls into it even as he tries to wrest himself further away from its widening maw. “Shiro! Shiro, are you in there?”

It it hears him, if it comprehends, the monster that might be Shiro doesn’t show it. Gaping jaws spread to bracket around Keith, as if prepared to consume him whole.

Keith can barely even thrash within its tight grip. “Shiro, please. Shiro, it’s _me._ Keith.”

The hungry maw hanging before Keith holds. The massive hand crushing him into the wall lets up a fraction and the claws rending through the metal on either side of his pinned body go silent. Its charcoal-like skull tilts slightly, angling so that a cluster of yellow eyes can fix upon Keith

Keith’s heart hammers against his ribcage like a trapped animal seeking escape. He wonders if Shiro can feel it through the clawed hand splayed over his chest. “Shiro... do you remember me? It’s been years,” he chokes out, emotions running uneven and unchecked. “I thought I’d lost you.”

One by one, Keith uncurls his fingers and lets the sword in his hand drift just out of reach.

“Do you remember when we’d race?” Keith whispers, the cold air stinging sharply at the tears that well up and wet his lashes. “The wind. The heat rising off the desert. You’d bring a picnic lunch and we’d sit in the shade of the hoverbikes. And then at sunset, it’d get cold and you’d give me your jacket. Mine was never warm enough.”

A rumble pours out of the strange monster Haggar’s made of Shiro. It keeps Keith pinned in place, pressure resting heavy on his slim chest, but oh-so-slowly the thumb sunken into the wall beside Keith’s throat rips itself loose and lifts to stroke delicately up Keith’s cheek.

Or it tries, anyway. The wound is fresh, the blood still wet, and the slightest tug against Keith’s skin makes him hiss. Somewhere deep within that monstrous casing of inhuman flesh and ghastly spines, Shiro notices; a mournful note slips out of those toothy jaws, keening and apologetic.

“My birthday. You bought me a cake. The first birthday cake I’d gotten in years, Shiro. Red velvet with strawberries,” Keith presses on, desperate to remind Shiro of who he is and how much he means to Keith in particular. “And you gave me those gloves. I still have them, back in my room on the base. And your jacket. I brought everything of you that I could when I left. And I never stopped missing you, Shiro.”

There’s only so far Keith can move his arm, with how it’s pinned, but it’s enough to lift his hand and lay it against Shiro’s forearm. His gloved fingers stroke gently over straining cords of unnatural muscle, all cold to the touch.

“So, please,” he whispers, “come back to me, Shiro.”

Toothy jaws snap shut a scant few inches from Keith’s nose, rippling with a snarl. And then the beast wrenches its grip loose and doubles over with an ear-piercing roar, a hook-clawed hand burying into its own flesh instead.

Keith is grateful for the low artificial grav for once, certain he’d have crumpled to the floor otherwise. He fishes his dagger from the air and awakens the blade as he pushes toward Shiro, still violently struggling to tear himself free. With a pained grunt, Keith jams the sword tip in alongside the bone white claws buried in the monster’s chest. This time, the luxite carves clean through clingy, glistening threads of dark ooze, and sweat beads along his brow as he takes care to avoid nicking the human form trapped within.

With a viscous splatter that coats the walls and fills the air with dark, shimmering globes, it finally works. Shiro emerges with the lung-deep gasp of someone who’s been trapped undersea for ages, his eyes wide. The remains of the monstrous body engulfing him tremble, fighting to hold form, before at last giving way in a sickening tide of sludge. The darkness and bony spines slough off of Shiro like a shedded coat of crude oil, leaving him bare and small and sluggishly bleeding where Keith’s blade grazed him during their fight.

“Shiro!” Keith sheaths his sword and races to catch him, to pull him clear of the strange ichor that now seeps through the metal grates and hangs suspended in the air. 

In his arms, Shiro is a warm and comforting weight, a quick but hard-beating pulse moving under his ribs. He is missing an arm, though, its abrupt end healed over in a messy webbing of scars. And at the crown of his head sits a halo of hair gone as pale as starlight, beautiful and tempting to touch.

The warm, silvery grey eyes that flutter open to fix on Keith are the same as ever, though.

“Keith? Keith, I was lost in a dream,” Shiro rasps, a trembling hand rising to meet Keith’s chest, bare fingers fanned over his ribs and sternum. “Or a nightmare. Keith... you saved me.”

“I’m here, Shiro,” Keith answers, not knowing what else to say. “I doubt I’d have made it this far if you hadn’t saved me first, you know.”

Shiro gives a shiver in his arms, and all at once the immediacy of the situation settles on Keith’s shoulders. The _Kaltor’s Will_ can barely sustain life, much less comfort, and Keith has no idea just how long Shiro’s been trapped within these metal walls.

He winds an arm around Shiro’s narrow waist and cradles him close, pushing off of a nearby wall and making his way back to the lab. Keith moves slowly, wary of the broken glass and debris wreaking havoc on Shiro’s bare and vulnerable body; he’d offer him the armor suit off of his back if he thought it’d fit across Shiro’s taller, broader frame.

“I just need to grab some intel and then we’re out of here,” Keith promises, refusing to let go of Shiro even as he tucks the microchip back into his suit’s collar and destroys the research on the computer console for good measure.

“I think I did this,” Shiro murmurs, gaze traveling the chaos strewn around them. He draws in on himself a little tighter, either from the chilly air that’s blanching the color from his hands and feet or the extent of the destruction. “Where are all the lab techs? The officers? The druid?” he asks last, swallowing nervously.

“Dunno,” Keith admits, more concerned with the open, trembling fear in Shiro’s voice. “But whatever you did, Shiro, it wasn’t your fault. _They_ did this. And if you hadn’t gotten to them, I would’ve.”

And however merciless Shiro’s monstrous self had been as he ripped apart the ship and killed his captors, Keith still would’ve been less kind.

Near an airlock, Keith finds an EVA suit small enough to fit Shiro. He helps Shiro slip into it, warming slightly as his eyes skim over the defined curves of Shiro’s amply-muscled body, the added breadth in his shoulders, the still-dark hair that dusts all the way up to his navel. He’s as eye-catching in the EVA suit, too, the material just clingy enough to hug across his chest and outline trim hips and strong thighs.

Keith clears his throat and busies himself with prepping the airlock, a little flustered to find his longtime crush resurging with a vengeance.

“Hold onto me and I’ll take us to my ship,” he says as he activates his mask again. An airtight helmet ripples into form around him, blessedly hiding his blush.

“Keith, wait.” Shiro’s hand settles on his shoulder, stopping him short; a shudder ripples through Keith at the first touch Shiro’s given him in years. “I’m dangerous. A risk. If I did all this, I could—”

“I’m not leaving without you. Either you come with me or we die on this ship together,” Keith tells him, matter-of-fact. If his voice sounds even more unyielding through the slight distortion of his mask, all the better. Then he softens, as he so often does when it comes to Shiro, and adds, “I can’t lose you again, Shiro.”

Shiro doesn’t argue it further as they pass through the airlock and into the empty sea of space, his arm wound tight around Keith’s middle and Keith’s legs locked around him in turn.

By Galra standards, Keith’s stealthed fighter is a tiny ship, barely comfortable for one. For two people with human stature, though, it’s more... cozy.

As soon as they’re aboard, Keith cranks up the life support system’s heat and fishes out an extra blanket from the emergency kit. He sits Shiro down on the bunk in the fighter’s narrow, cramped living space, drapes the blanket over him, and then crawls into the pilot’s seat to chart a course for home.

It’ll be vargas before they’re clear of the dead zone and able to make a transmission back to headquarters, which is well enough, Keith reasons. It’ll give him more time to build a case on Shiro’s behalf; Kolivan is going to have serious reservations about allowing one of Haggar’s successful experiments into the heart of the resistance, even if Keith vouches for him.

As he guides the nimble fighter into open space and turns the controls over to the autopilot function, Keith’s already making peace with the alternative. If Kolivan and the Blades can’t accept Shiro, then they’ll just go it alone. Or perhaps meet up with Matt and the rest of the rebels amassing in the Signa-3 Quadrant. Maybe Krolia would even come with them.

As he slips into the back of the ship, Keith finds Shiro cocooned in blankets up to his chin, silver eyes shining in the low, indigo-tinted light filtering in from the cockpit.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Shiro says, soft with wonder. “Much less all the way across the universe. And so... _big_ ,” he observes as Keith squeezes into the tight quarters of the living compartment, eyebrows lifting as his gaze pointedly dips to the slightly broadened set of Keith’s shoulders, the defined dip of muscle along his clavicle, the sinewy set of biceps more than capable of carrying a man twice his size.

Keith’s mouth curls up at the corners, subtly preening under that look. “Yeah, well. It’s been a few years. A lot about me’s changed.” 

But the teasing smile fades from his lips just after, preoccupied with what Shiro will think of the revelation that had brought Keith here, to the depths of space, in the first place. He’s been fighting alongside the Marmora long enough to have a clear delineation in his mind between Galra loyal to the Empire and those who resist, like his mother; Shiro’s had no such luxury, every encounter he’s had with Galra packed with enough trauma to last several lifetimes.

“I can tell,” Shiro says, reaching out to thumb at his light, flexible Marmora armor. “Definitely not of Earth-make, huh? I’m guessing the Garrison didn’t send you after me,” he murmurs, almost wry.

“No. Nah,” Keith says, shaking his head. He clears his throat and smooths a gloved hand down his front, nervous. “This is—so, uh... it turns out I’m half-Galra. On my mom’s side.”

Keith holds his breath and scans Shiro’s darkened eyes for flickers of what he expects to see. Confusion, maybe. Betrayal at discovering Keith’s connection to the people who’ve hurt him most. Even fear or disgust wouldn’t be all that surprising. 

But there’s none to be found—only a thoughtful, patient contemplation that gives way to a thoughtful grunt.

“That... makes sense,” Shiro murmurs. At Keith’s puzzled expression, he turns sheepish and adds, “When we used to spar, sometimes you’d—I thought it was a trick of the light or my imagination, but you’d kind of get, uh... fangs? Yellow eyes? But then I’d look again and you’d be your usual self again.”

“Oh.” Keith isn’t sure what to say, utterly thrown that Shiro had glimpsed parts of his Galra nature before he’d even known it existed himself. His brow furrows. “So, you’re not upset?”

“Why would I be upset? You’re the same Keith as always,” Shiro tells him. His smile is warm despite its thinness. “Except bigger. Your hair’s longer, too.”

“Yeah,” Keith thoughtlessly agrees, warm under his skin as he runs gloved fingers along the messy braid resting on his shoulder. “You’re the same Shiro, too. Except bigger. And your hair’s white.”

“And I’m missing an arm. And I’m capable of turning into a literal monster. And I hurt you,” he chokes out, his gaze flitting to the matted, drying blood on Keith’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Keith. I never—” 

“None of that’s your fault,” Keith firmly interrupts. He rummages in the medical kit above the bunk, hoping the wound will look less grisly once it’s cleaned up. He wipes away the blood with sterile wipes and dabs on a sticky healing gel, staunchly refusing to wince in front of Shiro. “This is a small price to pay to have you back. To have you safe.”

Shiro doesn’t look convinced, but at least he doesn’t press it. Neither does he resist when Keith gingerly settles beside him on the bunk and asks to tend his wound.

As the blanket slips from Shiro’s shoulders and pools around his waist, Keith is surprised to see only bare, scarred skin where the EVA suit had previously covered.

“It was uncomfortable,” Shiro explains, a dark flush spreading down his chest as Keith cleans away the blood still sluggishly seeping from the thin slice across his chest and delicately applies wound sealant.

“Understandable. Wasn’t made for human skin,” Keith murmurs, highly conscious of how warm Shiro is under his touch, how his many scars rise and dip along his flesh, how the tenseness locked into his muscles seems to relax beneath his gloved palm. 

While he works upon Shiro with far more care than he’d expended upon himself, Keith opens up and spills his soul about everything that had happened since Shiro left for Kerberos and took all the light in Keith’s life with him. 

His throat draws tight while he talks about the Garrison and their cover-up, then softens at the first mention of his mother. She’d raced back to Earth for him and his father, despaired to find the man she loved already long gone, and then escaped with Keith just as the first Galra cruisers began to break the atmosphere, Earth’s meager defenses crumpling. 

Keith had only heard about the onslaught and their planet’s fall secondhand. A small resistance had cropped up from the ashes, led by Colleen Holt, and joined the rest of the ragtag rebel forces strewn across the Empire. 

It’s only as he pauses to let out a sigh that Keith realizes he’d slumped comfortably into Shiro’s side somewhere along the way, like he often used to on afternoons when they’d huddled in the shade to escape the high desert sun. “O-oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Shiro says before Keith can even think of straightening up and putting a few inches between them. “I haven’t—it’s been a long time. It feels nice.”

It does. Keith considers that a green light for nestling even closer, his knees bent as he draws both legs up onto the bunk and rests his cheek against the swell of Shiro’s shoulder. “I think you’ll like the Marmora headquarters. You’ll be safe there.”

If they let them stay. If he can convince Kolivan that Shiro isn’t a liability. If Keith can protect him the way he means to.

Shiro lets out a dry, self-deprecating little laugh. “ _I’ll_ be safe there? Keith, you saw what I did to that ship. It’s you and everyone else I’m worried about.”

“But you’re fine now,” Keith insists, unwilling to allow for any other possibility. “You broke free. You let me go. You’re yourself again.”

Shiro quiets, his breaths going deeper, stretching longer. Consciously measuring them out, if Keith had to guess.

“Talk to me, Shiro,” he whispers against Shiro’s scar-flecked shoulder, dark eyes intently focused on that profile he knows so well—handsome as ever, but more troubled, too. “Do you think it’ll happen again? Can you control it?”

Shiro’s hand slowly curls into a fist. “I don’t know. I think... I think it was the pain that triggered it, maybe. The last thing I remember was the druid electrifying the floor of my cell. Feeling something in my body changing, growing around me. Then it’s all this hazy black, like opening your eyes in a dark room in the middle of the night.”

Keith can fill in the gaps, distressing as they are. His blood hums again with the need to act, to cut swathes through everyone who’d facilitated Shiro’s torment, to fell a whole empire if that’s what it takes to make Shiro feel safe again. And if it was agony that brought Shiro to transform and lose himself inside that monster of Haggar’s design, then Keith’s new mission will be ensuring that Shiro never experiences even a fraction of that suffering again.

He brings his arms up to loop around Shiro, lacing his gloved fingers tight and burying his face into the round of one scarred shoulder. 

“Then I’ll just have to keep anything from hurting you ever again,” he mumbles against bare skin that still reeks of acrid, sterile lab air and whatever organic prison had contained him.

But under all that, there are still notes of Shiro. The Shiro that Keith remembers from years past, forever linked in his mind with desert air and golden sunrises and the crisp smell of a clean uniform slowly given over to sweat and engine oil.

“I’m probably more trouble than I’m worth, Keith,” Shiro cautions, voice as soft as the half-hearted little laugh that slips out after. Still, there’s something timidly hopeful underneath the self-deprecation that coats his every word.

“Never. Shiro, you were there for me when no one else was,” Keith says, doing his best to banish every unsavory inkling of worthlessness from Shiro’s mind. He presses close and winds tighter around Shiro’s chest—like he can make himself into a shield for him, into unbreakable armor—and throws a long, lean leg across his lap for good measure. “The least I can do is the same for you.”

“The least you can do,” Shiro echoes in disbelief, his wonder almost bleeding into exasperation, “is cross the universe for me? Save me? Bring me home?”

He turns toward Keith and it leaves them almost nose-to-nose, their quiet breaths mingling. In the low light, the grey of Shiro’s eyes deepens, like freshly-burned charcoal or the darkest depths of a stormcloud. They shift and flit as he searches Keith’s expression for some unspoken answer, perfectly framed by the silky black of full lashes and thick, expressive brows.

Keith swallows. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” Shiro blinks, brow knitting as the plain response sinks in, and then flashes a bright, crooked half-smile that leaves Keith feeling like a teenager with a hopeless first crush all over again. “I... thanks, Keith. For saving me.”

“Any time, Shiro,” Keith says, meaning it. He smiles and adds, “As many times as it takes.”

“Well,” Shiro sighs, though his drawl is more dryly amused than anything else, “hopefully we can keep it to a minimum. One rescue per phoeb,” he jokes, the tiniest bit self-deprecating.

Keith could purr out of contentment as Shiro relaxes in his arms, trusting enough to lower his guard and drowse for what might be the first time in whole quintants. Shiro’s breaths deepen, calmly rolling out and in; his body goes pliant, slumping heavily into Keith’s welcoming hold.

And as Shiro’s head lolls to the side to rest atop his own, a perfect nose and full lips nuzzling sleepily into his unruly hair, Keith blushes and stammers out, “I s-set the autopilot on a quiet, roundabout route to the base, so we should be safe to nap for a while. There’s, uh, not a lot of room in the bunk, though, so I can go sleep in the cockpit—”

“No,” Shiro suddenly croaks, blinking up at him with eyes gone bleary for want of sleep. He lifts the edge of the blanket in invitation, nevermind that his EVA suit is currently undone down to his slim hips. “Stay with me. Please.”

Shiro doesn’t have to ask twice, given that there’s no place in the universe Keith would rather be than glued to his side.

Keith happily draws the offered blanket over himself and snuggles closer, vaguely reminded of a dozen cooling nights they’d spent draped under a thin Garrison-issued blanket as they stargazed on the roof of the barracks. There’d been some distance between them then, an uncertain span that Keith was never quite sure how to bridge.

There’s nothing like that now, though. He keeps Shiro ringed in his arms as they lie down together, wedged close in the narrowness of the fighter’s bunk, and smiles at the contented little groan Shiro lets out as soon as his back hits the mattress.

“You’re warm,” Shiro mumbles, his eyes closed and the first threads of sleep already taking hold. “Were you always this warm?”

“Always ran hot, yeah,” Keith says, grinning wider as a large, square-palmed hand worms down between the press of their bodies, seeking solace from the ship’s ambient chill. He reaches down and breaks the seal along the front of his Marmora suit, unzipping it down to his waist. “But it’s definitely gotten more intense over the last couple of years. A Galra thing, I guess.”

“It’s nice,” Shiro whispers, blush deepening over his cheeks as he smiles and tentatively pushes his chilly fingers into the opening of Keith’s suit. His hand comes to rest against Keith’s ribcage, soaking in the warmth from his skin with a contented sigh.

Shiro falls asleep like that, a palm pressed to Keith’s bare chest as he instinctively curls around him. The weary lines around his eyes and between his brows fade. His full, pale lips relax into a slight part. Without that steady undercurrent of anxiety strumming through him, Shiro looks years younger. Even with the scar. Even with the faded, moonlight-bright hair.

Keith holds him while he dreams, his heartbeat skipping every time Shiro nuzzles closer or murmurs his name in his sleep. After so many years of everything gone awry, this at last feels _right_.

In four or five vargas, they’ll have more hurdles to face. Keith doubts that getting everything he wants—Shiro safe by his side within the Blade of Marmora, near his mother and everyone else he cares about—will be easy. But nothing ever has been, not for either of them, and it won’t stop Keith this time either.

For now, all that matters is that Shiro is himself again, at peace where he lays in Keith’s arms. Right where he belongs.

  
  



End file.
